Fall is one of the best seasons to garden – it’s perfect for planting and enjoying cool days outside, with more relaxed harvesting and growing. There are even more reasons to love the fall garden, especially when it reduces maintenance for ecological benefit.
You’ve worked hard to create a thriving landscape with biodiversity and pollinator-rich resources. Come autumn, nature continues the work for you. While the warm season is for active growing and flowering, the all-season garden provides essential habitat for beneficial insects, birds, and wildlife year-round. In addition to flower and nectar sources, our plants offer the just-as-critical overwintering requirements.
As the seasons transition, we may have to train ourselves to avoid overtending and overtidying. More maintenance isn’t always best for garden services like soil health and plant protection. So, let’s embrace the unfussy autumn garden as we find beauty in form and contrast. The season’s joy unfolds with more time for observing nature’s ways.
Here are five ways to embrace a wilder (yet still beautiful) aesthetic by reducing your fall garden clean up.
Support Pollinators and Biodiversity
As gardeners, we know so much depends on the pollinators that create the productive ornamental and edible crops we rely on. Much of the thought behind our plant selections often relates to the partnership between attracting beneficial insects and promoting plant health. We strive for a diverse landscape that promotes ecosystem services and supports insects, birds, and wildlife that, in turn, benefit the garden. Fall is rife with opportunities to continue this enrichment with ease.
The fall and winter landscape is an important habitat for native bees, butterflies, and moths. These overwinter and lay eggs in fallen leaves and hollow stems. Amphibians like frogs, invertebrates, songbirds, and small mammals find safe harbors in the winter shelter of standing plants, logs, brush piles, stone walls, and healthy soils. The creatures that live in our gardens in spring and summer stay local in the cool season with a supportive habitat; they’re just more hidden and less active.
Supporting pollinators and wildlife is one of the primary reasons for not cleaning up your garden this fall. I can’t think of a better excuse for not fussing over dropped leaves, keeping each bed prim and tidy, or cutting back all perennials. However, there are more reasons to embrace the season’s bounty while spending more time planting and enjoying the garden and less time maintaining it.
Leaves Are Garden Gold
After enjoying the color-changing autumnal foliage, the hustle and bustle of the associated leaf drop and cleanup ensues. Instead of removing leaves, let them remain in place or distribute them to benefit trees, shrubs, perennials, flowering bulbs, and overwintering pollinators.
Use fall leaves as natural mulch. They’re a renewable resource, right from the garden, and a mulch, compost, and soil conditioner all in one. Leave them where they drop or lightly rake whole leaves into beds to add insulation for roots as temperatures drop. The leaves decompose over time and add nutrients to the soil as they break down.
The leaves also add ecological benefits, such as sheltering habitats for nesting, egg-laying, and overwintering creatures like swallowtail butterflies, luna moths, and stick insects. Leaving the leaves is a pollinator-friendly practice.
If you have loads of leaves and too many to use at once, let any extras head to compost to become leaf mold for future soil enrichment and mulching. It takes about six months to yield completely decomposed leaf material, but leaf mold is easy to make and a valuable resource for amending native soils at planting and for topdressing.
Seed Benefits
Late summer marks the time to stop deadheading flowering ornamentals that produce seeds or create interesting floral forms to enjoy through winter. There are numerous benefits to allowing blooms to go to seed this time of year unless you’re working with an aggressive spreader. To prevent a plant from reseeding, continue to remove spent flowers through fall.
Attractive seed pods and bloom structures add aesthetic value and variety to the cool-season landscape. Seed pods and heads provide lasting winter appeal, with subtle beauty in the morning dew, covered in frost, or starkly contrasting to a snowy backdrop.
Natural seed drop continues the display in future seasons. This works well in naturalized cottage, informal gardens, and perennial borders. It ensures you’ll have plants well-suited to your site’s growing conditions. If you’ve got the room, allow seeds to drop and sprout in the spring.
Certain perennials rely on cold winter temperatures for germination. A period of cold stratification is necessary to form strong seedlings. Black-eyed Susan, coneflower, catmint, sedum, milkweed, and beardtongue are seeds that benefit from cold stratification.
Another key benefit of letting plants go to seed is food for songbirds and other wildlife. Seeds provide energy stores in fall and winter when food sources become leaner.
Seed production also creates an opportunity to collect and store seeds for future planting. Seed saving is helpful for heirloom or favorite food crops, especially if they’re hard to come by or from pass-along selections. It’s cost-effective and helps promote genetic diversity among our crops.
Plant Health
When we’re accustomed to tidying up, cutting back, and removing brown debris, it’s counterintuitive to leave winter-dormant material hanging around. These decaying parts, though, have value when they remain in place.
The first is ornamental value. By adjusting our aesthetic, we find absolute beauty in plant forms as they evolve across the seasons. In late fall, this means browning foliage and bare stems—part of the garden’s natural senescence.
Many ornamentals benefit from less garden clean up by avoiding fall pruning. These species may set buds on old or new wood, like roses and hydrangeas, whose pruning time varies. The leafy crown of perennials provides insulation against winter extremes. It also offers coverage for dropped seeds to keep them in place.
Some selections, like echinacea, coreopsis, monarda, Joe Pye weed, and rudbeckia, form hollow stems and dried leaves that become nesting cavities for native bees and other insects. Ornamental grasses are a haven for birds and small mammals for food and shelter.
There’s a balance between cutting back herbaceous perennials to prevent fungal disease and leaving woody specimens standing. Leaving selections in place without cutting back may reduce runoff. It also helps form a natural snow fence or break.
Soil Enrichment
The final reason not to clean up this season is to enhance soil health. As organic material breaks down, it adds nutrients to the surrounding soil, making it more rich and fertile. Micro and macroorganisms process the biomatter into valuable nutrition for plants. Plants absorb the nutrients through their roots as growth resumes in the spring, and the cycle continues.
Decomposing plant parts also help aerate the soil and reduce compaction. Dropped leaves and leaf mold create in-house amendments. Those healthy earthworms will thank you!
